When The Obvious Doesn’t Come To Mind

I was facilitating a fundraising planning meeting last night – a brainstorming session with people who care a lot about a community-based advocacy group and were trying to think about who else might care enough (like them) to become a regular contributor.

“Beyond the Event” was the theme of the evening, because the organization had a lot of event regulars – people who came to their special event year after year because they threw a great party, but didn’t give to the annual appeal or in any other way. And while events are great for visibility, they’re a pretty expensive way to raise money if they’re all you’ve got!

So we generated a lot of ideas, from new moms because they’re concerned about safety issues with young kids, to consumer product manufacturers because they need to “green-wash” their reputations – and then I took a second look around the room.

I noticed how many health professionals were around the table – doctors, public health officials, professors – and I was struck with how the issues this group worked on were considered by these professionals to be matters of life and death for the community.

Why wasn’t “health professionals” up on the board along with all those other, more exotic ideas?

When I piped up and asked that question, a lull went over the room. It was the hush of recognition: “Oh yeah, there’s lots of us here.” Ergo, there was a kinship with this cause and a set of social values around public health – and reason (i.e. case) for giving.

So why hadn’t people come up with that themselves? Why had they been grasping at more tenuous rationales instead of looking around at the familiar?

It’s that view of a donor as someone “other” – someone “with money,” someone alien, someone to be chased after and found, rather than someone who’s growing in the soil right next door. Now that soil metaphor could lead us down a whole gardening path of cultivation, water and sunlight, etc. – but I’m going to stop with the notion of reaching down right below your feet. Not searching out into fields unknown, but looking at the materials that shaped you and others just like you – for it’s genuinely true that donors ’r us.